[Illustration: Drawn from a plate in Auguste de Bastard's _Peintures et ornements de la bible de Charles le Chauve_.
The earliest representation of the crwth yet discovered dates from the Carolingian period. In the miniatures of the Bible of Charles the Bald,[10] in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, one of the musicians of King David is seen stopping strings on the finger-board with his left hand and plucking them with the right (fig. 2); this crwth has only three strings, and may be the crwth _trîthant_ of Wales. A second example occurs in the Bible of St Paul,[11] another of the magnificent MSS. prepared for Charles the Bald, and preserved during the middle ages in the monastery of St Paul _extra muros_ in Rome (now deposited in that of St Calixtus in Rome). Other representations are in the miniatures of the 11th, 12th and 13th centuries. To Edward Heron-Allen (_De fidiculis opuscula_, viii., 1895) is due the discovery of a representation of the Welsh crwth, showing the form still retained in the 18th cent. On the seal of Roger Wade (1316) is a crwth differing but little from the specimen in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The 14th-century instrument had four strings instead of six, and the foot of the bridge does not appear to pass through the sound-hole--a detail which may have escaped the notice of the artist who cut the seal. The original seal lies in the muniment room at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire attached to a defeasance of a bond between the _crowder_ and his debtor Warren de l'Isle, and a cast (see fig. 3) is preserved at the British Museum. The British Museum also possesses two interesting MSS. which concern the crwth: one of these (Add. MS. 14939 ff. 4 and 27) contains an extract made by Lewis Morris in 1742 from an ancient Welsh MS. of "Instructions supposed to be wrote for the Crowd"; the other (Add. MS. 15036 ff. 65b and 66) consists of tracings from a 16th-century Welsh MS. copied in 1610 of a bagpipe, a harp and a _krythe_, together with the names of those who played the last at the Eisteddfod. The drawing is crude, and shows an instrument similar to Roger Wade's crowd, but having three strings instead of four.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--Crowd on a 14th-century Seal.]